Programming for Beginners

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak in Denver at our Visual Studio 2012 Launch Roadshow. If you don’t know what they are, check out my earlier blog post to find out when the next one is. It might be in your area.

During one of the Q&A sessions we had, one of the attendees mentioned that they were for an Office support person and would like to more about programming. I was a bit surprised when she said that, but I realized that not everyone’s a developers.

Channel 9 Content

With that said, I’ve been gathering material so I can teach my kids how to program and during my search, I came across some great material on Channel 9 called “Channel 9 Content for Beginners”. At the moment, it covers five different areas for aspiring developers to learn: Visual Basic, C#, HTML 5 & CCS3, JavaScript, and how to build apps for Windows Phone 7.

Each series has a number of videos to watch and source code for you to practice with. The videos are not long and the presenters are very engaging so you won’t get bored watching them.

Virtual Labs

A lot of times when you’re learning something new, you might not have the time to set up your machine just the way you want to learn the technology. No problem. Microsoft has taken many of the Hands-On Labs we release as kits that you can download and created a number of virtual labs that you can use. You try them out at MSDN Virtual Labs. This really helps create a friction free experience for you to jump right in and test any segment of the Microsoft platform, from Windows 8 to BizTalk to SQL Server to Team Foundation Server.

Just select the hands on lab you want to check out, a virtual machine gets provisioned for you to you online.

Hands-On Labs

Speaking of hands-on labs, if you’d like to get familiar with Visual Studio 2012 and TFS 2012, check out the Visual Studio 2012 Application Lifecycle Management Virtual Machine with Hands-On Labs. Brian Keller did an amazing job putting this together so you can learn all the different areas of Visual Studio 2012 and TFS 2012. His blog talks about an easy way to download all the content and get started using it.